I first started (seriously) reading education blogs after NECC 2007. The thought of reading blogs as a means of professional learning never entered my mind. I guess I had the perception that the content would be more personal in nature, which is why I never pursued it. Thankfully, I have seen the light (cue music).

I would say the very first blog that I became acquainted with was Mark Wagner’s Educational Technology and Life. I had attended a session he did on Wikis at NECC 2007 and followed him to his blog. I somewhat vaguely recall finding my way to Technorati after that and finding Vicki Davis’s Blog Cool Cat Teacher. Her blog blew my mind. It’s like information overload, but the biggest gem that I found was her blog roll. From there I was able to find quite a few other blogs of interest and it snowballed from there.

When the snowball became too unmanageable, I began looking into RSS. I had no idea what I was doing and simply Googled RSS aggregators and found a couple of desktop applications that I liked. After some time (a few weeks), I realized that I wanted my feeds online so I could access them from any computer. I tried Bloglines, PageFlakes, and for a while settled on NetVibes before my subscriptions began to get too numerous.

Then I found Google Reader and I’ve been there ever since. I am currently subscribed to 136 different feeds, not all of them blogs, and as I write this I have over 800 posts that I need to peruse. In my defense, last week I was off work for Fall Break and didn’t even look at them and now I’m preparing for GaETC next week. But I digress.

The Google reader “Discover” function is great, and it allowed me to find a few interesting blogs that was not already subscribed to as well. Truthfully, I had tried to find other blogs via Technorati, but didn’t find it easy to search through. My best resources have been the blog rolls from other blogs. I take them as recommendations and typically they’ve been great additions to my reader.

As for a few items of interest, I’m going to focus on several posts related to Voicethreads. The first post is Voicethread Resources you NEED to SEE! from NCS-Tech. I am always on the lookout for Voicethread resources and his post pointed out two that I was not previously aware of. The second post comes from The Tempered Radical and the title of the post is Scoring Voicethread Participation. The third post comes from Wes Fryer’s blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity. His post does a wonderful job of outlining how a particular teacher used Voicethread in a safe way, stating that the project “exemplifies “best practices” for safe publishing of student work”. I liked this particular post for the reason that some districts block Voicethread and others aren’t sure how to use it and Wes writes about the safety of Voicethreads as well as how this teacher structured her project.

Photo Credits: Flickr Denis Collette